Making Irish Shortbread with a 7-Year-Old! | The Bigger Bolder Baking Cookbook

3, 2, 1, oh man. Hi Bold Bakers, my Bigger Bolder Baking cookbook is all about helping anyone to bake with confidence anytime anywhere. This is why I have Charlotte, my Bold Baking sous chef, and we are going to make, Charlotte what are we going to make? We're going to make a recipe from my book, so this is an exclusive recipe from my book. Do you want to tell them what we're going to make? Yeah, it's Irish Shortbread. Bigger Bolder Irish Shortbread. So this is a recipe that I grew up on in Ireland, it's a really really lovely buttery cookie and you said you love shortbread right Charlotte? I love shortbread. Charlotte loves shortbread so that's why when we went through the book, this is the one that we stuck with. So this is from chapter one and chapter one from the book is, do you remember what it is? It is full and wooden spoon. There you go, good girl. And in that chapter, it's the first chapter so it's really great for little hands and maybe if you don't use machinery or anything like that, there's lots of cookies in that chapter and there are some crumbles and crisps and things like that so you can really make an array of desserts without having to use a machine. Yeah. That's good. So the first step Charlotte is to… Preheat the oven to 300 Fahrenheit or 150 degrees Celsius. So the good thing about this recipe is that it can be made in a traditional oven or what we're going to do today is make it in a toaster oven. Loads of people don't have big ovens and they maybe only have toaster ovens and I don't know if you know this but my kitchen, Charlotte knows, my kitchen is very small isn't it Charlotte? Isn't it smaller in real life than it looks like on TV? So small. Is that a good toaster oven Charlotte? Yeah. Is it dirty? Let's go down to this one here, number two. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until pale, light and fluffy. Perfect. Now our butter here, see that word? This is really important. Softened. When it's written in a recipe to use softened butter, you have to use softened butter. Yeah. It's really important. It is really important. It's so important. Because you see when you're doing this by hand Charlotte, you have to have your ingredients nice and soft so you're able to mix it. If it's too hard you're not going to be able to mix it by hand. Yeah. And then what are you going to do? I don't know. Have to turn it. Yep. We'll have to use a hand mixer or something. Okie dokie. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to add in the butter and then what I'm going to do is get you to measure the sugar. So how much sugar do we need? We need a half a cup. Half a cup. So I've got a quarter of a cup here and we're going to do two of those. Lovely. Now Charlotte, how strong are you? Show me your muscles. Those are good muscles. I think they're bigger than mine. So here's what we're going to do. I think we'll share doing the mixing. Okay. So you start out and what you have to do is cream the butter and the sugar and all that means is just mix these two together really well until they're pale light and fluffy. So there you go. And if you need to, I'll hold the bowl. So creaming is a very basic, actually one of the first baking methods that you would learn. Something that I learned as a child because we made a lot of cookies and we would make buns and things like that. So you'd have to cream together the butter and the sugar. So the whole entire chapter, the first chapter is a lot of this. So it's a great kind of introduction to baking and it's kind of, it's a good way to kind of start out and then build up towards the end where some of the desserts might be a little bit harder. This will be Charlotte. Okay. I'll give it a go now. Watch how strong I am. Oh man, I'm so strong. Okay. Now you go. I really can. There you go. That looks pretty strong. That's perfect. Good woman. You did awesome. So Charlotte, what's our next step? Add the flour and cornstarch. Mix very lightly until you have a smooth dough. Gorgeous. Wow. If you want, I'll level that off for you to make it better because you always level off your spoons when you're baking. You don't have to worry about getting flour on the floor because Kevin cleans up after me. Yeah, I'll make it dirtier. I didn't say that when you did that. In you go. Lovely. One more. Gorgeous. Now, how much of the cornstarch? Cornstarch, one cup. One cup. Just one cup. Do you know why we add cornstarch into our cookies? Why? Because it kind of makes them drier, so it makes them really crispy. So there's loads of butter, so it's a really buttery cookie and then it's kind of dry and crumbly, which is actually a really, really lovely texture to have in a cookie. So we're going to get a cup of cornstarch. So let's have a look, Charlotte. So we added in our flour, we added in our cornstarch. So now what you have to do is mix it together until you have a smooth dough. Do you think you'd be able to make this cookie by yourself? Yeah. To be fair, you kind of technically have. I just stood here and handed stuff to you. So for all the recipes in the book, I gave a little anecdote or a little story about where the recipe came from or what it means to me. Shortbread was something that my sister used to make. Lots of the kids in my family used to make different things. I remember George made profiteroles and Suzanne made chocolate cake. Herlan used to always make shortbread and it was very, very similar to this. And it's just really easy. Like it's a really great recipe for kids because it's only a few ingredients and you can do it all by hand. You're doing good, Charlotte. All the sides. Will I do a little mix? Get in the book. There you go. You see it start to come together. And do you see now why I said softened butter? Yeah. It's really important. This is caramel dough. Yeah. This is starting to come together. Yeah. Perfect. I think you did great. This is looking lovely. It all kind of came together. Now all we have to do is just push it into our baking tin. So Charlotte, it says in the recipe, we need an eight by eight tin. And that's what this guy is. It's the perfect size and it makes nice, thick shortbread. You want to see my trick for buttering? When you have butter wrappers, you grease your tin with the butter wrapper. And then you can now put it in the bin and you've got a greased pan. Genius, huh? Genius. Instead of just taking a stick of butter. Exactly. Yeah. I came up with that. I invented that. Yeah. Don't ask anybody else, but I did. There we go. And then we're going to line it with parchment. What is our next step? Where are we at? We're at four. Press the dough into the pre-prepared pan. OK, lovely. Charlotte, if you wouldn't mind, get the dough into the pan there. Lovely. You're doing good. Good job. So Charlotte, do you mind getting your hands dirty? No. No? I like mixing. I'm going to get you to push your hands in there and then just form it into the tin. Then we're going to cut it into sticks. Yeah. Always thinking one step ahead, Charlotte. Yeah. That's a buttery baby. Just push that back in there. Okie dokie. Nothing's on there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut it into fingers. So what you want to do is just kind of like make an indent. If you imagine when it bakes, it'll already have a kind of, we'll call this scoring. It will already have these lines in there. So it'll just make us a lot easier to cut your final shortbread. And then what I'm going to get you to do, because I think you're going to be good at this job, is prick the holes in the shortbread. Gorgeous, Charlotte. That's great. Thank you. All done. So check that out. Bigger, bolder Irish shortbread that Charlotte made. Basically. And I helped, but I helped. Remember? Remember me helping? Yeah. So we're going to pop this into the oven now. You want to bake your shortbread enough until it's a lovely light golden brown on top. Charlotte, our job is done for now. Let's go take a break. OK. Ta-da! Wow. Look how gorgeous that is. Do you notice that it kind of puffed up a little bit? Yeah. And if you push down on it, it's kind of firm underneath your finger. Nice. I'm just licking the crumbs. Charlotte, in a word, what does it smell like right now in this kitchen? Baked butter. That's exactly what it smells like. You see the way our lines stayed? So you imagine that a cookie that's half butter is just going to be absolutely delicious. Yeah. Look at that. Isn't that gorgeous? That looks so great. So Charlotte, how do you think we did? Do you think they look like the picture in the book? Gorgeous. Let's see on the other side. Yep. Just like it. Do you want to try a little bit? Yeah. That's good. It's good, huh? Just a tiny bit sweet. But all in all, good. Yeah, it's really good though. Very crumbly. Also very soft. So and crispy. But it's really good. Yeah, it's crispy on the outside and soft in the middle because of all that yummy butter. It's a pretty easy cookie to make with just like four ingredients. If I come to your house one day, will you make this for me? Yeah. So as you can see, this is just one recipe that anyone can make anytime, anywhere. And I've got over 100 more in my cookbook. It's Charlotte approved, right, Charlotte? I love it. You love it. Thanks. Would you buy my cookbook? Oh, thank you. We say goodbye now to everybody, Charlotte. Bye.